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Engaging Employees through a company’s Corporate Responsibility is the focus of one of Stephen’s next workshops in May with Business in the Community. For more details contact Stephen.Farrell@flourish.co.uk

A guardian article (see below and link) considers what motivates people through the example of a Michelin Chef. Stephen is no chef, nor Michelin standard but his decision eight years ago to develop a tourism business in South India, reflects that personal motivation to do what he can influence, and that he loves and believes in.

So how do we ceate this in our organisations and enable our colleagues to become their own master and find purpose. There are many paths but a critical one is an appropriate organisational culture that moves way beyond lip-service!

“Managers should pay attention to chef Sébastien. They might try to impose performance measures on their employees. They might dangle carrots in the hope of encouraging higher output. But people are not donkeys. They are wise to these crude tactics. Sensible employers have been rethinking their approach to managing performance, with firms such as Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, General Electric and PricewaterhouseCoopers all abandoning the traditional annual appraisal.

Carrots and sticks – or plain old intimidation – will not work, not in the long run. What the psychologist Frederick Herzberg called “kick in the ass” management can produce movement, but not motivation. As he explained in a famous Harvard Business Review article almost 50 years ago: “If I kick my dog (from the front or the back), he will move. And when I want him to move again what must I do? I must kick him again. Similarly, I can change a person’s battery, and then recharge it, and recharge it again. But it is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it.”